Crashes Went Down 15% In Harlem Trash Container Zone, As Mamdani Hawks Citywide Rollout

Crashes and serious injuries dropped 15 percent and 52 percent respectively in West Harlem after New York City swapped vehicle storage for curbside trash containers according to data crunched by Streetsblog as the Mamdani administration promoted its effort on Friday to bring the trash bins to the entire city.

In the first week of June, the city finished its neighborhood-wide implementation of trash containerization in West Harlem, requiring every building with 30 or more units to put their trash in Empire Bins, the city’s version of European-style trash containers.

Since the city installed 1,100 curbside bins in Manhattan Community Board 9, a zone roughly bordered by West 155th Street, West 110th Street, St. Nicholas Avenue and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the streets have gotten dramatically safer. Crashes dropped from 668 in the 10 months before the bins arrived to 587 in the 10 months after the bins (a drop of 15 percent), and serious injuries dropped from 38 to 18, or nearly 53 percent, in the same time frame.

Injuries to pedestrians dropped by 9 percent.

The data shows that swapping parking spots for trash containers not only leads to better environmental outcomes like fewer rat sightings and less trash juice on the sidewalk, but may also have a positive effect on safety.

That should be welcome news for the thousands of New Yorkers who are about to benefit from the expansion for the Empire Bin program. On Friday morning, Mamdani announced that the trash containerization push was going to expand to a handful of neighborhoods in every borough by the end of 2027, and the city would finish a full residential rollout by the end of 2031.

“The era of Empire Bins is now dawning,” Mamdani said at a press conference in Crown Heights, shortly after acknowledging the unique couture of a Streetsblog fashion. Prospect Heights, Crown Heights and Weeksville — aka Brooklyn Community Board 8 — will get their bins this year.

The other neighborhoods that will get trash bins by the end of 2027:

• Hunts Point, Longwood, University Heights, Mount Hope, Morris Heights and Fordham Heights in the Bronx (Community Boards 2 and 5).
• The West Village, SoHo, Little Italy and Greenwich Village and Nolita in Manhattan (Community Board 2).
• Sunnyside, Hunters Point and Woodside in Queens (Community Board 2).
• The North Shore in Staten Island (Community Board 1).

As part of the Brooklyn containerization, the three neighborhoods in the expansion will get 1,096 bins that eat the trash of 25,000 homes. The bins will be mandatory for every residential building in these, and future expansion districts, that have 30 or more units. The city will also give buildings with between 10 and 30 units the option between getting a smaller Empire Bin or using wheelie bins to bring their garbage to the curb.

By the time the city is finished bringing the bins to the entire city at the end of 2031, there will be about 10,000 of the containers on the curb according to Sanitation Commissioner Gregory Anderson. In the initial expansion through 2027, the bins will take up 6,500 spots on the curb that would otherwise be used to store cars, according to Gothamist.

According to Mamdani, the city is putting $15 million into this fiscal year’s budget, and $35.5 million in the capital budget across the 2027 and 2028 fiscal years. The mayor said that the schedule to bring the bins to the entire city is moving on the fastest timeline possible.

“What we’ve seen is a conversation around containerization over many years that has yielded a single community district,” he said, referring to the West Harlem pilot undertaken by his predecessor, Eric Adams. “We set these goals not only to meet them, but also to serve as an example of what it is we’re looking at as an actual timeline.”

Anderson offered a more granular reason for why the full containerization push will take five years, which is that New York is building a supply chain that didn’t exist until recently, one that involves having North American and European manufacturers work together to build the specialized side-loading trucks.

“These bins, and more importantly, the trucks that service them, did not exist in North America two years ago,” said Anderson. “We are building a new supply chain that crosses the Atlantic Ocean to get those trucks here, built, and ready to use. We did one district last year, we’re doing one district this year. That was the commitment from the previous administration. Five districts next year, 51 districts over the course of [2028], ’29, ’30, and ’31. That’s an ambitious timeline, and we are committed to meeting it.”